I like space music – perfect to settle my mind and help me focus on the work at hand. Not just any space music but in particular the productions that are broadcast by Hearts of Space. Producer Stephen Hill has been at the microphone of this weekly show for over 30 years. His meticulous attention to detail is what separates his work. You will notice his voice and cadence are unique but so well matched to the subject matter. His attention to the details focuses on the music. Example, the online player is allowed to fade out and in as you switch tracks or even turn it off. Music is delivered at the pace best suited for slowing down, at a pace that built the star factories and black holes we explore today. So what’s this got to do with Plugins?
Over the past few months I’ve been building a few forms. Nothing super special. Two of the forms gather contact information and personal details about the faculty and staff at the University. The form plugin I chose to use for this project was Visual Form Builder Pro.
Screen shot of a form built with Visual Form Builder
I like Visual Form Builder Pro (VFB). It makes building a form super easy and the styling right out of the box is pleasant. I also like the conditional logic provided – the ability to show or hide form fields based on a user’s choices. In a word, slick. So for my project where I had to immediately assess the users role within the University (Faculty or Staff) and deliver appropriate questions (which college versus which department, etc – example at left) Visual Form Builder was a great choice.
Hard Lesson
One of the features of VFB is that it stores the form results in a database. When I first began the projects I realized I would need to capture the form data in a database and pull it out later as we needed to use it. So VFB appealed to me. What I neglected to look at was what format VFB put the data into the database in. Turns out it puts the data into the data base in such a way that it’s very hard to extract with a query for something specific. I should have realized this but I overlooked it.
For a programmer, this hurdle can be overcome. VFB provides hooks into their form handler that allows you to customize where the form results are sent. So rather than sending them to the VFB handler for processing, I could send them to my own handler. Which I did.
What bothered me about this is that I shouldn’t have to. I’m experienced enough to realize what I needed to do but what about the thousands of users that may buy this product with the same expectation but without the same experience/knowledge of how to resolve it – let alone the ability to actually build the solution? Before I embarked on building the solution myself, I contacted the creators of VFB and asked them if they would build it for me for a fee. The answer was a flat no. I felt like I’d asked some insane question – something totally unreasonable.
Notes for those who seek a plugin solution.
- Do your homework.
- Check the plugin details and the forums to be as sure as you can it will do what you want.
- Check for support – active support – in case you need help.
- Down, install, test, test, test – before you commit and spend a lot of time investing in a plugin that doesn’t do what you expected.
Notes for plugin authors.
- Please be clear about what your plugin does and doesn’t do.
- Please provide alternative solutions for services you won’t provide.
- Please think about the user and the user’s needs. Yes, sometimes it’s hard to know how they’ll use it – so it’s a good idea to keep track of and even seek out user input.
- Please provide a support forum and be realistic about the level of support you are willing/able to provide.